Conventionally, there have been increased on-vehicle external devices that output notification information for informing a vehicle occupant of various kinds of information. Thus, there has been proposed an information processing apparatus that previously assigns priorities to pieces of notification information, for example, when notification timings of a plurality of pieces of the notification information output from a plurality of external devices are overlapped with each other, adjusts which of the pieces of the notification information is preferentially reported on the basis of the priorities (see Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2007-145137, for example).
However, the conventional technology has room for improvement in informing a vehicle occupant of a piece of notification information in an appropriate priority. For example, during autonomous driving for automatically controlling driving operations, it is preferable that information on entertainment of an occupant is prior to information on the driving operations. On the other hand, during manual driving, it is preferable that information on the driving operations is prior to information on entertainment of the occupant so that a driver is able to more concentrate on his/her driving.